Critical Writing

Currently Reading

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“Since 1857, hardly a year has gone by without some sort of Brontë ‘biography’ appearing. These range from pious accounts in Victorian conduct books to Freudian pyschobiographies, from plays, films and ballets to tourist brochures and images on tea-towels, from sensation-seeking penny-a-liners to meticulous works of sober scholarship. Each generation has rewritten the Brontës to reflect changing attitudes – towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. The BrontëMyth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture and Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontës themselves.”

Text reproduced from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bronte-Myth-Lucasta-Miller/dp/0099287145/ref=sr_1_1?crid=JRQVJMGQ82N&keywords=the+bronte+myth&qid=1682966752&sprefix=the+bronte+myth%2Caps%2C684&sr=8-1 (accessed 01/05/23)

PhD Research

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Poems – by Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell is a collection of poetry written by the literary sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë. Published in 1846 under the pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell, it only sold three copies when first published. After the success of their later works, the poems have since garnered more attention and acclaim. The Brontë sisters consisted of Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849), who belonged to a nineteenth-century literary family associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters are most famous for their novels, namely Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre”, Emily’s “Wuthering Heights”, and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, each an irrefutable classic of English literature. Contents include: “Mementos”, “The Wife’s Will”, “Gilbert”, “Life”, “The Letter”, “Regret”, ” Presentiment”, “The Teacher’s Monologue”, “Passion”, “Preference”, “Evening Solace”, “Stanzas”, “Parting”, “Faith And Despondency”, “Stars”, “The Philosopher”, “Remembrance”, “A Death-Scene”, “Song”, “Anticipation”, “The Prisoner”, etc. Complete with biographical notes of Emily and Anne Brontë by their sister Charlotte Brontë, along with an Essay by Virginia Woolf on the Brontë Family Home, Haworth.

Current PhD Research

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“Bringing together contributions by artists, writers and theorists, ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ addresses the role that art practice and art-based research plays in expanding notions of fieldwork. At once a handbook for research and practice and a philosophical speculation, this book offers the unique opportunity to explore ways of working within vastly diverse climates and terrains using image, sound, movement and other sensing technologies. It also offers more creative and speculative interventions into the idea and location of the ‘field’ itself.

Focusing on a range of projects from across different geographic locations and situations, the book highlights the crucial contribution that art can make to environmental and climate studies offering a valuable intervention into current discussions of artistic practice and research. ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ presents a series of propositions and speculations … radical practices for radical times.

Contributing authors: Angus Carlyle, Alliance of the Southern Triangle/AST (D Bauer, F Grodin, P M Hernandez, E Kedan), Bianca Hester, Bridget Crone, David Burns, Henriette Gunkel and Eline McGeorge, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Julie Gough, Kate Pickering, Kreider + O’Leary, Kristen Sharp, Melody Jue, Nicholas Mangan, Philip Samartzis, Polly Stanton, Ruth Maclennan, Sam Nightingale, Saskia Beudel, Simon O’Sullivan, Susan Schuppli, Therese Keogh.“

Text reproduced from https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/fieldwork-for-future-ecologies/ (accessed 24/04/23)

PhD Synopsis

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Brontë Country Map

The Chorography of Place: Mapping new ecologies of landscape, memory, history and visual culture.

This PhD by practice aims to explore chorography’s relevance as an organising principle in contemporary artistic practice and critically address the historic yet neglected role of chorography in the documentation of place. Chorography, or place writing, is the artistic representation of a regional map which originated in Classical Geography (c.149AD). This field-based approach and detailed descriptor of place takes region as it’s lens and qualitatively maps characteristics of the locale by examining the constituent parts of that place. If a sensory physical mapping of place occurs prior to representation where is the body in the process of chorography?

There is a need to distinguish this act from its documentation and re-presentation to provide new theories, forms and applications by addressing the political implications of the embodied in the act of representation. To provide a contemporaneous account the performative relations between the body, mapping and place; the mobile, embodied and situated are therefore central to a contemporary interpretation of chorography.

To enact these relations sites chosen for their historic, symbolic or mythological significance include Brontë Country which straddles West Yorkshire and the East Lancashire Pennines, the Devil’s Bridge in Wales and St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall. Applying chorographic methods in artistic practice I aim to realise a historically grounded exploration of place by performing and documenting embodied, visual, textual and symbolic mappings. These mappings will form the basis of artworks, critical and performance writing, book works, performance and installation which will translate chorographic methods and the physical act of mapping into artistic practice. Combining historic method with contemporaneous form will enable a renewed understanding of the chorography of place not just artistically but physically, contextually and historically.